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Introducing Increment
- sytse 9y agoThanks Stripe for advancing the industry by generating this content. I'm impressed with how broad they interpret their mission of increasing the GDP of the internet. Their Atlas program is the best example. BTW on https://stripe.com/about https://stripe.com/about I only found "Help us build the universal payments infrastructure of the internet." but it is listed on https://stripe.com/press https://stripe.com/press Disclosure: I'm interviewed in one of the pieces https://increment.com/on-call/the-benefits-of-transparency/ https://increment.com/on-call/the-benefits-of-transparency/
- pc 9y ago> BTW on https://stripe.com/about https://stripe.com/about I only found "Help us build the universal payments infrastructure of the internet." But it is listed on https://stripe.com/press https://stripe.com/press. Good point! We should clean that up.
- scrollaway 9y agoIf you get the chance, that about page could use some optimization too. It's running at 1fps on my beefy machine (Chromium, Linux).
- zacmps 9y agoDo you have HW acceleration enabled? I found that I had to ignore the GPU blacklist[1] in order to get HW acceleration on linux. While on the same card it worked out of the box on windows. [1] chrome://flags/#ignore-gpu-blacklist
- sytse 9y agoYou make me feel better about spending time on HN as a CEO :) Keep up the good work and the worthwhile mission.
- ryandrake 9y agoOff-topic, but that about page is pretty awesome. Is that everyone who works at Stripe? If so--kudos, what a nice touch. Most start-up "About Us" pages just show smiling head shots and bios of the founder and senior execs, as if they're the only people doing anything in the company.
- jacquesm 9y agoStripe is in a class of its own in many ways.
- fizx 9y agoIt's more that if you put all of your employees up there, they start getting poached. It says a lot about Stripe's workplace culture that they're not afraid of this.
- ryandrake 9y ago> It's more that if you put all of your employees up there, they start getting poached. I hope you're joking, because that seems like a very silly reason in the age of LinkedIn and recruiter databases. It's probably very easy to find a relatively up-to-date list of employees for any given company out there. My guess is that most small companies don't do this simply because they don't even consider that it would be a nice gesture to publicly recognize more than just the top execs.
- tensor 9y agoSpeaking from experience, it's actually worries about poaching, letting the competition know the size of your various teams, and possibly privacy for employees too. You are right that with things like LinkedIn you could probably get a lot of this information, but it's enough of a hurdle that execs still think it's worth it.
- shawn-furyan 9y agoWell, then this is superstition on the part of those execs. LinkedIn is the one tool that every recruiter uses. They are more likely to map out your employee network on LinkedIn than to even visit your company website at all (much less count on it for having accurate up-to-date information).
- davidw 9y ago> how broad they interpret their mission of Does that seem a bit... bubbly to anyone else?
- blizkreeg 9y agoUnrelated q: is increment.com an off-the-shelf magazine theme or custom development?
- pc86 9y agoI would be shocked if something from Stripe was using an OTS theme.
- polutropos 9y agoThe styles and animations are quite similar to the Stripe dashboard, so I would assume it's all internal styling.
- keehun 9y agoIt doesn't look like any off-the-shelf magazine theme. The source code is incredibly clean and not littered with organizational elements like Wordpress might emit. It also most likely isn't an off-the-shelf magazine theme because there's no credit to any external author of the design in either the website or the code. Also, the source for the page is in 1 single line. Doubt any off-the-shelf theme would do that!
- LoSboccacc 9y agorip high scalability blog
- jacquesm 9y agoFeedback in case anybody from stripe is tuned in: I'd love to read these stories but not 6 around the same theme all at once. Like that it will take years (at your rate of publication, 4 times per year) to cover even the basics of running a complete operation. Please consider mixing different aspects for a single issue, both in the name of variety and to cover some ground in a reasonable time. Other than that: thanks for publishing this, I've often wondered why there isn't a central repository (like a wiki or something like that) with the various recipes you can use to tackle a given problem and what works and what doesn't in practice.
- alistproducer2 9y agoyeah, I would've liked to see some more diversity in the content as well. I do like the concept though. It's nice to see companies putting resources towards efforts like this.
- criddell 9y agoI think each issue will have a theme.
- shawn-furyan 9y agoI'm willing to ride with this format. Magazines tend to be disposable except for when they have a particularly impactful in-depth piece or themed issue. This format is all themed issues with in-depth pieces. It also allows Stripe to focus resources more effectively on the supposed goal of delivering evergreen authoritative recommendations. This is something that is sorely lacking in the current environment where anything over 6-months old is often unusable. The internet currently provides more breadth in the area than a single person could possibly need. I laud the focus on depth.
- MacsHeadroom 9y agoThis format sounds like HBR for software professionals. Sounds great to me.
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- VikingCoder 9y agoThere are multiple ways to successfully organize teams of software developers. What matters most is that the choices are consistent and coherent. It's nice to read about practices that work in one environment, but you have to keep in mind how they integrate in to the big picture of all of the choices. For instance, some teams branch everywhere, for everything. Which is fine, and some people do it to great success. Some teams develop at head, for everything. Which is fine, and some people do it to great success. But the tools you need to build around those two approaches are totally different. Reading about the tools and techniques, without understanding how they all fit together, and trying to adopt them because they work for other people, could be a recipe for disaster.
- mattste 9y agoThis is awesome. Is there an email form where I can sign-up to get an alert when a new issue is released?
- dorian-graph 9y agoOn the bottom of the Increment homepage.
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- timdorr 9y ago> Susan Fowler joined Stripe to found and edit Increment and the first issue launches today. BTW, this is the same Susan Fowler of ex-Uber fame: https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-one-very-strange-year-at-uber https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-on... Congrats on the new position, Susan! I'd be interested in hearing what it's like moving from a code-focused job to a content-focused job. Seems like a very unique shift!
- jacquesm 9y agoThat would be nice, as well as a 'one year in' perspective on the cultural differences between those two companies. Getting the company culture right is a lot harder than getting the tech right.
- bartkappenburg 9y agoShe joined stripe in Jan 2017 and left uber in dec 2016.
- jacquesm 9y agoYes, so that would have to wait for a bit. Still, it would make for very interesting reading.
- _hamilton 9y agoI need a physical copy of this 'magazine' so I can read it on the pooper. :) Thanks Stripe.
- criddell 9y agoI thought this might be the micropayment service that I've been waiting for. Turns out, it's a newsletter.
- davidjnelson 9y agoThis newsletter looks great! I too would love to see Stripe offer micropayments.
- TuringNYC 9y agoI was hoping it was some declining balance product as well!
- aero142 9y agoOne of the things that stuck me when reading Susan Fowler's Uber article, was just how well written it was. It gives me a lot of hope for this magazine.
- xbeta 9y agoInteresting, Will Larson [1] was also a manager at Uber, probably worked with Susan in the past. [1] : https://www.linkedin.com/in/will-larson-a44b543/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/will-larson-a44b543/
- nrook 9y agoI was surprised to see no discussion of an oncall bonus or compensation in the first issue of Increment. This is a practice which is uncommon but not rare in the industry; Google, for instance, offers generous compensation to developers with a serious oncall shift. It would be interesting to see a discussion of this topic, but I suppose this is expected if a publication is published by a company rather than by laborers directly.
- teach 9y agoCould you go into more detail? It seems like the goal of the magazine is "practical and useful insight into what effective teams are doing." Is there any evidence that on-call bonuses or compensation affects the quality of work that a team does? Maybe there is, but most of the research I've seen doesn't support that conclusion.
- tensor 9y agoI think employee retention would be a much bigger concern. On-call work is very disruptive and I suspect many developers would be quite unhappy to be asked to do that without some form of compensation. Compensation seems like an extremely important topic when trying to put together an on-call program.
- toomuchtodo 9y agoCoversely, you can't dump all of the on call work onto your Ops/DevOps team unless you're compensating them appropriately (or the team is large enough that on call rotations are infrequent). Otherwise, say goodbye to retention.
- nrook 9y agoThe question of compensation is relevant to the topic of a sustainable on-call rotation, described by Katherine Daniels in this article: https://increment.com/on-call/crafting-sustainable-on-call-rotations/ https://increment.com/on-call/crafting-sustainable-on-call-r... Intuitively, I suspect that a generous oncall compensation plan would mitigate a harsh rotation to a certain extent, but that engineers would still burn out eventually. But that's just my intuition, and I have only personal experience to back it up: I wanted to hear what other companies were doing, and was disappointed the topic wasn't covered in this otherwise comprehensive issue.
- snackai 9y agoWould really prefer Stripe to release more payment options like Bitcoin or Paypal, or adding more countries and their more local payment options.
- jmtulloss 9y agoBitcoin is supported! https://stripe.com/docs/bitcoin https://stripe.com/docs/bitcoin We are also expanding our coverage, you can sign up to get notified when we open up access to different methods here: https://stripe.com/payments https://stripe.com/payments.
- Zaheer 9y agoImpressed by Stripe's marketing strategy. With the acquisition of IndieHackers.com and now this, they're taking content marketing to the next level.
- randomerr 9y agoIt seems like a different view on Agile.
- noir_lord 9y agoI like that the "Ask an Expert" about on-call emergencies section has an answer from Phil Calçado (Director of Product Engineering at DigitalOcean) Made me chuckle. [1] https://www.digitalocean.com/company/blog/update-on-the-apri.. https://www.digitalocean.com/company/blog/update-on-the-apri.... (for anyone who missed them nuking the production db).
- jacquesm 9y agoEvery company I've ever seen, including the best ones has made at least one mistake of that calibre (or much, much worse) in their history. In most cases you never heard about it because it happened early enough that hardly anybody noticed. The only reason you know about this one is because DO is large enough to be newsworthy, or you might even be a customer of theirs. The hard part of running a start-up is to get to that point where if you fuck up enough people will notice that it makes the press.
- noir_lord 9y agoNo criticism of DO was implied and I agree every company has such issues (I locked myself out of most of the servers the other day because I deleted id_rsa instead of id_dsa and then had to walk home to get my back up drive). It was just amusing timing.
- jacquesm 9y ago> No criticism of DO was implied and I agree every company has such issues (I locked myself out of most of the servers the other day because I deleted id_rsa instead of id_dsa and then had to walk home to get my back up drive). Oops :) > It was just amusing timing. Ah ok. Your link doesn't work btw.
- lbearl 9y agoIt looks like something ate your link.
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- mempko 9y agoSome of the best content of this type I've seen is from the ACM. If you are not a member I really encourage you to join.
- switch007 9y agoWhich part of the ACM? They have like 10 magazines, 50 journals...and much, much more.
- dominotw 9y agohttp://queue.acm.org/ http://queue.acm.org/
- tedmiston 9y agoThat's kind of surprising because the ACM content I receive via email is usually the trends but behind the times. There are plenty of good things about ACM but I've never felt that content was a strength.
- elastic_church 9y agoNice, I'd been wishing for a "devops" book full of case studies - what situations teams were in and how they handled it. Occasionally you get an engineering blog post, but most of those are just boasting unilaterally about a solution, and not any critical discussion of the problem or the myriad of bandaids most of us have to deal with. This might be a step in the right direction.
- sciurus 9y agoYou may like Build Quality In. "The interdependent disciplines of Continuous Delivery and DevOps are of immense value to an organisation, but they are hard. We have seen Continuous Delivery and DevOps work in the wild, as have other practitioners. We want to help people on their own Continuous Delivery and DevOps journey, by sharing the experiences of those who have done it – what worked, what didn’t, and the highs and lows of trying to build quality into an organisation." https://leanpub.com/buildqualityin https://leanpub.com/buildqualityin
- siliconc0w 9y agoGreat work - love reading this stuff. As a sort of mini-rant - with so much 'incident transparency' with Slack, Email, Dashboards, Hangouts, etc high-sev issues can devolve into all hands events if you haven't nailed the culture as well. These can be intensely political - where you got random managers/execs who haven't touched code in years in the Slack channel trying to look engaged and competent offering suggestions like, "Have we tried rolling back the release?" and the smart engineers who could actually fix the problem are afraid to do anything because everything they do is broadcasted to the entire company. It's relatively easy to adopt the tools and processes of successful tech companies but it's hard to get the culture.
- tedmiston 9y agoAfter a few years of experience, I'm convinced that "getting the culture right" and later "not fucking up the culture" are the hardest parts.
- arkaniad 9y agoThis seems like a cool idea. I do wish there was an RSS feed available for me to add to my feed reader, though.
- edwinwee 9y agoThere is! https://increment.com/feed.xml https://increment.com/feed.xml
- drinchev 9y agoSide-topic alert. Stripe is my top design company these days. Just looking at their landing pages [1], [2], I'm deeply impressed by their effort on making the web beautiful. Huge inspiration for me. Kudos to their front-end / design teams. 1: https://stripe.com/atlas https://stripe.com/atlas 2: https://stripe.com/connect https://stripe.com/connect
- OJFord 9y agoExcept I can't read this blog post on my Nexus 7, Android, Chrome. (Both sides are cut off.)
- devopsproject 9y agoYou pesky android users are always complaining about my beautifully designed pages. They look great on my iPad. There must be something wrong with your droid /s
- memco 9y agoNot to rain on your parade, but it also cuts off on the right side when shifting from portrait to landscape on iPhone SE.
- tormeh 9y agoWorks fine on my Nexus 6P. Guess they didn't test Android tablets.
- vinay427 9y agoIt doesn't work on my Nexus 6 with a modified DPI to emulate a tablet, so yes, this is likely the case. I'm not sure how they missed such a major set of screen resolutions.
- user5994461 9y agoWell, they just became my worst design company. The noise the fan of my laptop made after 10s of that connect page. OMG. I do not approve of these useless animations. Lucky I'm not running on low power mode or that would probably have frozen my browser for some time.
- reledi 9y agoAny plans to have a physical copy with subscription?
- flavor8 9y agoOr a PDF.
- dominotw 9y agowhat an unfortunate name. sounds like excrement.
- bitdiddle 9y agomy thought exactly, memo to marketing :)
- necubi 9y agoAny chance of getting this in kindle/e-reader compatible format? The website is beautiful, but reading long-form content is so much nicer on e-ink.
- tedmiston 9y agoThis is an excellent idea. Would love to read it on a Kindle.
- sidchilling 9y agoYou can go to the Reader mode on Safari and export as PDF, then email the PDF to your Kindle (enabling conversion). I did that and it looks near perfect. However, you have to do this for each article, which takes some time. Well... not as smooth a process, but the articles are long-ish and worthy of preservation on your Kindle.
- tedmiston 9y agoYeah they could totally do the multiple articles in one Kindle publication like Instapaper does.
- solatic 9y agoYeah, there needs to be at least an RSS feed. An email subscription is just going to get lost in my inbox and otherwise I'm never going to see when new issues come out. Once there's an RSS feed, there are a variety of services which will read the feed and send it to a Kindle.
- icebraining 9y agohttps://increment.com/feed.xml https://increment.com/feed.xml (for most readers, putting just the domain should auto-detect)
- JBReefer 9y agoIf anyone knows a way to programmatically export reader-mode style PDFs, I can throw a quick website together or something.
- edoceo 9y agoWill Stripe discuss their choice to selectively enforce their own TOS? I'm sure many start-up business would like to know how to pick and choose when they enforce their own TOS
- 19eightyfour 9y agoI love how Stripe is transitioning into a services company for internet companies, particularly startups.
- iamleppert 9y agoNot sure what to make of this, given the redundant, monochromatic content about being on-call. It doesn't appeal to me. A magazine format is not appropriate for such a narrow focus. You're not going to gain the continuing readership without a sufficiently broad appeal. Also, the introduction of putting down the rest of the industry while simultaneously extolling your own ideas is very off-putting, especially if we haven't heard them yet. The strength of the Stripe brand matters not; I do not know who you are. That said, Stripe is a great company and I'd love to hear more about how they are doing things. But please, if you want me to pay attention to you, sans the hubris self-congratulatory tone.
- dhruvp 9y agoI love how Stripe does so many things that provide value to the developer community from their awesome blog posts to their open source retreats and now finally to this magazine. They're a model to me of how to earn the good will of your users through providing authentic value.
- sebringj 9y agoNetflix never pre-announced their series of extremely useful videos because they were just useful and people watched them in droves often being top results on Hacker News. Youtube + articles are nice for that sort of thing and I don't see a reason to deviate from that if the content is actually worth viewing.
- danellis 9y agoWhy package articles up into a quarterly "magazine"? That doesn't make much sense on the Web. Why not publish the articles in a blog?